Tamil Nadu is India’s best e-governed state: Study

New Delhi, Dec 5 (IANS) Tamil Nadu has emerged the best e-governed state in India in 2008-09, according to the findings of a study by a leading information technology market tracker, IDC India.The fifth such IDC India study conducted for publishing major CyberMedia’s flagship fortnightly Dataquest found that Tamil Nadu has climbed three spots over last year’s ranking, to emerge as the No. 1 state in e-governance.

Another southern Indian state, Andhra Pradesh, too climbed three spots over to reach the No. 5 spot.

The north Indian states of Himachal Pradesh, Delhi and Haryana are placed second, third and fourth, respectively. Delhi has slipped two ranks from No. 1 last year, while Himachal Pradesh and Haryana have climbed up five and 14 places respectively, a CyberMedia press release said.

“West Bengal, Jharkhand and Bihar make up for the worst three in terms of e-governance,” the statement said quoting the study.

West Bengal, that has traditionally been slow to catch up on computerisation, had covered a lot of ground in the last few years but it still has much catching up to do, the study said.

It is among the last three in terms of ranking on six of the 12 citizens parameters and seven of the 15 business parameters.

“Some may argue that West Bengal at No. 19 cannot expect any better with a per capita allocation of Rs.13.78 on information technology (IT) - way down at No. 17 in the country,” the study said.

“However, IT spend is not the sole criterion as proved by the best e-governed state in the country - Tamil Nadu’s per capita spend at Rs.8.31 puts it at No. 20 in IT spend in the country,” the study added.

Not unexpectedly, Bihar, a first time entrant in the list, is among the bottom three on 27 of the 27 combined parameters for citizen and business services.

Jharkhand is among the bottom three in nine of the 12 citizen parameters and 15 out of 15 in the business parameters.

The only three parameters where the state does not find a mention in the bottom three is agriculture, healthcare and employment exchanges.

“E-governance has a long way to go in India. There are good projects, but there’s too much duplication of good work in the government,” said Dataquest’s chief editor P.K. Roy.

“Central departments are duplicating work by building multiple citizen databases - census, voter IDs, PAN records, food and civil Supplies - and wasting thousands of crores. And yet they cannot tap onto a common view of the ‘customer’, the citizen,” Roy added.

“India’s federal structure also gives a great deal of autonomy to the states, so they guard their turf, and are distrustful of too much information visibility to central departments,” he said, adding: “This makes it even more challenging to replicate good projects.”

The results of the survey will be published in the Dec 15 issue of Dataquest, a CyberMedia statement said.